Politics: Murder Rate Rebounds to Peak Levels

MEXICO - Report 14 Jul 2016 by Guillermo Valdes and Esteban Manteca

The May report from the National System of Public Security (SNSP) confirmed a murder rate growth trend dating back to the beginning of 2015 and a return to levels of four year ago at the peak of the government’s war on organized crime.

Four northern states – Baja California, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas and Zacatecas— were already in the bad category but the frequency of intentional murders there continues to grow. The resurgence in the first two states in this list is especially troubling since Baja California and Chihuahua had become the model for lowering the homicide rate since 2011; it now appears that conditions are spinning out of control in those two northern border states. Some extra-official versions hold that this reversion to previous levels of violent crime reflect new turf wars among drug cartels for control of these points of entry into the United States.

Sinaloa, the only state that moved from the category of high murder rates into the “good” ranks in the most recent period, is increasingly the scene of bloodletting between rival relatives of Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán and supporters of other cartels who could soon drag the Pacific-coast state back into the bad or worsening category. In Colima, Michoacán, Guerrero, and Morelos, where conditions are bad and worsening, the presence of organized crime syndicates related to the illicit drug trade could also explain the high murder rates. We should add to this picture the hypothesis that the recent risen in violence in and around the city of Tijuana, Baja California, is due to an effort by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) to challenge the Sinaloa cartel for control over this western cross-border transit point at the same time as La Línea –a drug trafficking operation based in Ciudad Juárez— is reorganizing and fighting to establish control over that centrally located border city that is currently in the hands of the Sinaloa cartel. Should this hypothesis be confirmed, it would come as no surprise if the levels of violence and intentional murders continue to climb toward levels not seen since the worst years of the war on drug trafficking organizations.

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